Although we did the conversion to CFLs a few years ago, we’re on the second phase and slowly coverting to LED bulbs as the CFLs burn out. The technology has already come a long way in the last 2 years and LED bulb prices are starting to come down. At this point, if you haven’t changed out your incandescent bulbs, you might as well skip the CFLs and go straight to the LEDs! With 1/4-1/3 of the power use and 10,000-50,000 hour lifespans, LEDs are certainly the way to go.

Newsweek picked up this off-the-record comment by Senator Obama prior to the debates:

“I don’t consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, ‘You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.’ So when Brian Williams is asking me about what’s a personal thing that you’ve done [that’s green], and I say, you know, ‘Well, I planted a bunch of trees.’ And he says, ‘I’m talking about personal.’ What I’m thinking in my head is, ‘Well, the truth is, Brian, we can’t solve global warming because I f—ing changed light bulbs in my house. It’s because of something collective’.”

The beauty of this unscripted, honest response to climate change is that it demonstrates that Barack Obama isn’t just about the superficial, pop-media responses to the crisis, he has a deeper understanding of the work we have in front of us. He realizes that this isn’t something that a few token efforts will solve, it will require sweeping changes in how we live, how we utilize energy and our resources, and massive changes in our fuel and energy infrastructure. He knows that it’s not about the effing light bulbs.

The BMW group has announced that it will have 500 Mini E’s ready to deploy in California by the end of 2008! This electric version of the cuddly yet sporty Mini will house a 150kw (204 hp) motor powered by Li-ion batteries that will go 0-62 in 8.5 seconds, rock an electronically limited top speed of 95 mph, go an estimated 150 miles to a charge, and will be repowered in 2.5 hours by a garage charger. These vehicles unfortunately will only “initially be made available to select private and corporate customers as part of a pilot project in the US states of California, New York and New Jersey”, but it’s a start and I’m optimistically hoping that they’ll see great success and get to the consumer sometime in 2009-10.

We’ve known about climate change for decades, yet hardly any action has been taken until recently. We’ve seen fuel prices rise and the threat of peak oil has loomed closer and closer, threatening a global energy and economic meltdown at any time. Since the EV-1, subject of the film “Who Killed The Electric Car”, we have yet to see a consumer-oriented, highway-capable electric vehicle come out of any of the major auto manufacturers. Sure, we’ve seen prototypes, concepts, and a flurry of promised vehicles from startups, and don’t forget the DIY movement, where an enterprising wannabe engineer can spend a few hundred hours and $10K or more on an EV hobby kit, but where have the electric cars been for the rest of us? We want to go to the car lot, test drive a few, and slap down less than $25k for a nice, solid, reliable electric car with all of the bells and whistles. The technology is there – the only stumbling block has been battery technology, which is advancing at a blinding speed. Why hasn’t the industry gotten together to make a standard interchangeable battery pack that can be swapped out with better technology in 5-10 years when it’s ready? I’ll take a car with a 100 mile range now with the prospect of a 300 mile range in a few years when batteries are better!

Like it or not, we’re in at least a recession and possibly heading for a depression. The federal government can bail out banks and throw money into the system without having any real inkling as to whether it will actually work or not, but there’s no denying that we will all be affected. Some will lose jobs, some will take a hit on retirement, some will lose their homes, and some might even have to sell their second yacht. Regardless of where you stand, as we approach peak oil, energy, food, and transportation will continue to become more costly, and as finances become tighter, we will all have to take a good look at how we use our money and our resources.

How can you protect yourself against this downturn? Become as self-sufficient as possible. With the renewed and expanded tax credits, and more payment plans available, residential solar installations are now within reach of many Americans. Solar hot water and solar ovens to cook your food will decrease your gas or electric bill. Plant a garden for cheap, fresh vegetables and herbs and some free exercise instead of a gym membership. Compost your kitchen waste for free fertilizer for your plants and garden. Look into a commuter bike or an electric bike or scooter for fast, nearly free local transportation. Find out what public transportation is available to you and take the bus or the train to work, or find other commuters to carpool with. Perform an energy audit of your home and replace incandescents with CFL bulbs or even better, energy-sipping LEDs. Turn off unused lights and electronics with power strips to combat phantom power loads. If you’re upgrading or changing appliances, make sure that your new ones are Energy Star certified, particularly your computer, refrigerator, dishwasher, clothes washer and dryer. Reinsulate your home and seal doors and windows against drafts. Plant fruit trees and berry bushes around your property for year after year of seasonal food that can be canned for use later or given away as inexpensive but creative and sustainable gifts. There are hundreds of other small changes that you can make that are not only rewarding and will decrease your impact on the planet, but will save significant amounts of money for you and your family as food and energy prices rise. This is not only a conscientious thing to do, it’s fiscally responsible!

In a blatant maneuver to stay in the good graces of oil companies and keep their ad revenue, ABC has refused to air this commercial from the Alliance for Climate Protection at wecansolveit.org. Lets see. . . we can support a message funded by the public for the public good in a time of crisis, or we can pander to the oil companies, those partially responsible for the mess we’re in.
Sounds like a boycott to me! I’ll stick to CNN and BBC (Sorry FOX, I only watch to laugh at your ridiculously obvious bias to the right. NBC is biased to the left, but isn’t quite as blatant as FOX – but Olberman does great rants).

I hate to keep harping on Governor Palin, but unfortunately she deserves it. It is imperative that the middle America that she somehow appeals to understands how utterly inappropriate she is as a Vice Presidential Candidate, making the otherwise reasonable McCain ticket a no-deal (I’d still vote for Obama, but McCain isn’t a bad guy). In the vice-presidential debate, Palin called herself an “energy expert”, which, it seems, is a moniker earned in a similar manner to her supposed foreign policy prowess. By her reckoning, she is close to Russia, making her a foreign policy expert, and there’s oil in Alaska, making her an energy expert.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Actually, none of our candidates fully understand the dire nature of our global energy crisis. It’s not just climate change that we should be worried about – it’s peak oil. Just like the economy taking a downward spiral in a “perfect storm” of deregulation, risky mortgages, bad decisions on consumer’s behalves, industry greed, and bipartisan legislative ineptitude, climate change and peak oil are intimately intertwined and we are heading straight into the eye of yet another perfect storm. By nearly all estimates, peak oil, or the time when we cannot pump anymore oil from the earth in a day, is either happening now or will happen within the next 5-20 years. What this means practically is that as daily oil extraction levels off and starts to decline, as long as demand continues to rise, we will see an astronomical spike in oil costs and worldwide shortages. Let me repeat – if we continue to use oil as we do today, within the next few years to few decades, we are guaranteed to see huge oil shortages and massive price increases. This is not supposition, it is supported by oil industry insiders, geologists, and energy experts alike and if we do not shift to alternative forms of energy quickly, starting right now, civilization as we know it, fueled by oil, will grind to a halt. Not only that, but once the oil is gone, if we haven’t prepared ourselves, we’ll likely fall back on the other, dirtier fossil fuel that is still plentiful – coal. This, in turn, will accelerate the already unstoppable threat of climate change.

The fact is, that offshore drilling and drilling in ANWR will give us a few measly percent of our annual oil use. The rest must still be bought from unstable Middle Eastern dictatorships, some of whom continue to funnel oil money into the hands of the very terrrorists that we are trying to defeat. We can pour money into drilling for more of a dying paradigm and building multi-billion dollar nuclear plants, neither of which will yield any power for a decade. Or, we can focus our efforts and resources on researching and building a renewable energy infrastructure for our entire country, which will protect us from the global economic collapse that will occur as peak oil hits. We will be actively fighting climate change, we will generate domestic jobs, we will wean ourselves off of foreign oil, and we can reclaim our role as a leader and innovator in the world.

Not one of our presidential or vice presidential candidates has even mentioned peak oil, and we’ve barely heard a peep about the environment or climate change. None of these people are energy experts, especially not Governor Palin, who continues to spew her “Drill, baby, drill” mantra. She will not bring you lower gas prices, nobody will. If you calculate the true cost of a gallon of gas, including extraction, refining, transport, and environmental impact, it should be around $12/gallon. For the better part of a century, we have enjoyed cheap gas subsidized by government tax breaks, political power plays, and even war, and now that we’re starting to see fuel prices rise towards what a true and fair market price would be, Americans have cried in outrage rather than taken action to become part of the solution.

At least Senator Obama and Senator McCain recognize the importance of climate change and renewable energy, at least they have an inkling of the true crisis at hand. Governor Palin is still in denial about climate change and is proposing to waste more of the taxpayers dollars on what will become a nearly obselete energy source within our lifetimes. Sorry, but this “Joe Six-Pack” needs a leader who has the intelligence and foresight to set aside their preconcieved notions, objectively evaluate the evidence and take steps to lead us into a prosperous and sustainable future, and Sarah Palin is not that leader.

Last month Laura and I were fortunate enough to make it to see two of our favorite artists, Ben Harper at the Santa Barbara Bowl on August 22nd, and Jack Johnson at UC Santa Barbara on August 27th. Each of these trips are about a 220 mile round trip and to save money and relieve our eco-guilt, we of course drove our biodiesel vehicles in another installment of Fossil Fuel Free roadtrips. For the Ben Harper show it was just me and Laura, so we took the 2003 Jetta TDI wagon which gets 37+ miles/gallon on our homemade biodiesel. The show was fantastic, Santa Barbara Bowl is a fantastic venue, and watching Harper rock out on his slide guitar will drop your jaw in amazement as he melts your face off with his ridiculous musical talent.

For the Jack Johnson show, we carpooled with some friends and took the Vegfalia for some straight used vegetable oil transport. The Jack show was fantastic as always and as a bonus, he has the “All At Once” initiative in full swing. His mellow musical stylings always get the crowd swaying and bouncing to the beat, listening to his honest and heartfelt lyrics. The show was a bit festival-like, with the All-At-Once tent and a circle of tents housing various environmental groups as well. Impressively, the entire concert tour is striving to be carbon neutral, through biodiesel-powered tourbuses and generators and CO2 offsets. Also, there were water stations to refill your reusable bottles, discouraging bottled water, there were recycling bins next to every trash can, the concert T-shirts were organic cotton, and if you collected enough stamps from refilling your bottle, carpooling, and visiting the environmental non-profits there, you were entered to win a JJ skateboard or to get up on stage with Jack. Also, any donations to the non-profits were matched by the Johnson Ohana Charitable Foundation. Basically Jack Johnson is demonstrating by example that large events and tours can have minimal environmental impact and he it seems that he is successfully converting fans to be more mindful of their consumption.

Climate Change and Peak Oil

In the United States, we use over 20 million barrels of oil per day, over 7 billion barrels per year, importing more than half of this volume from Africa, the Middle East, Russia, and other oil-producing states.
In purchasing this oil from other parts of the world we put billions of dollars per year into the hands of oil shieks, outdated theocratic rulerships, radical Islamic militants, and even terrorists. The pursuit of this oil has many costs, including the billions of American tax dollars spent on a war that is largely political in order to secure our access to this resource. Already unstable, any breakdown in the current oil economy will lead to skyrocketing fuel prices for Americans. Even the experts within the oil industry predict "peak oil", that is, the highest possible global oil production, to come anywhere within the next 10-50 years. After that point the maximum amount of oil that we can pump out of the ground will decline despite the growing demand for oil for energy, plastics, gasoline, jet fuel, and the many other uses for petroleum. This is a second major reason for a fuel cost spike, that will hit our economy terribly, from which we may not ever recover.
A second major global crisis that is intimately intertwined with energy is climate change. The latest data suggests that the polar ice caps are melting even faster than previously predicted, leading to erratic weather patterns, severe droughts and floods, and rising sea levels. If our current energy consumption continues to grow as predicted, we will have set the stage for severe natural disasters displacing millions of people from their homes, killing an unestimateable number of humans and animal species, costing billions of relief dollars, as well as costing more than 5% per year of global economic growth indefinitely. These two issues go hand in hand – our voracious appetite for energy requires the burning of more and more fossil fuels which in turn leads to more of the CO2 emissions that cause global warming. This is not supposition and is not theory. It is fact. There are many resources to support these estimates and projections from leading politicians, economists, climate experts, geologists, and other experts in their fields.
What this means is that this energy crisis will occur within many of our lifetimes and all of our children's lifetimes. We cannot leave the downfall of our civilization and the scarring of our globe as a legacy to our next generation. Do not take the media’s word, or my word for that matter, research it for yourself so you understand the dire position of our current crises.